The Case for Smart Substations
The phrase “smart substations” might sound like an oxymoron, but in truth, these somewhat dated electrical structures could use a little smartness. Substations play a crucial role in the transmission and distribution of electricity, but they represent yet another aging component of an aging infrastructure. Meanwhile, thanks to always-on internet connectivity, more is demanded of them. Thus, now is the perfect time to enhance their capabilities.
Why Smart Substations are Better
First, let’s do a quick review of substation functionality. In general, they can house equipment to switch generators, circuits and lines into and out of operation, change voltage levels and shift power between currents, and provide operational monitoring functionality for distribution system managers. Simply put, a substation is the decision point for grid reliability.
Really, their importance as a central hub necessitates they get upgraded. Most of the substations operating today are roughly 5 decades old, and they were not designed to accommodate things like 2-way renewable energy flow, billions of IoT devices, and electric vehicles. These new developments have exponentially increased the amount of data that flows in, out, between and within systems. Making substations smarter is necessary to process all of this data.
According to the ECM article I linked to above, relays are the ripest component of substation operations to make smarter. These devices monitor substation conditions and use these measurements to execute control circuit commands. Making relays smarter would allow them to execute “decisions” based on pre-programmed logic. Additionally, they could be equipped with enhanced communication and monitoring capabilities to, for example, detect a problem before it creates a malfunction.
Smart substations are more feasible in this day and age because utilities have largely adopted consistent ethernet-based communication protocols that allow substation devices to create their own local area network that can communicate with other local area networks. Previously, different utilities followed different protocols, which prevented broad inter-system communication.
The bottom line is that smart substations will be an extremely important element of reliability going forward. Therefore, it would behoove utility decision-makers to start planning for the necessary enhancements sooner rather than later.
